App of the Week: Mountain Tweaks

About a year ago, OS X Lion was released for the Mac. It brought many great features to Lion, some from iOS and some brand new. However, it changed up a number of things that annoyed some users. An app called Lion Tweaks, which I reviewed for a previous App of the Week post, was released to help users tweak Lion to their liking. With the release of Mountain Lion for the Mac, developer Fredrik Wiker has come back to help us tweak.

Mountain Tweaks is a new app that does essentially the same thing as its older brother with a few improvements. Mountain Tweaks works to be compatible across both Lion and Mountain Lion, making it a one stop shop for Mac users. Mountain Tweaks is organized into 4 tabs: “General”, “Lion Tweaks”, “Mountain Lion Tweaks”, and “Restore”. The settings under each tab are as simple as selecting Yes or No under the setting you wish to alter. The general tab shows several settings that range across multiple versions of OS X. According to the developer, most of these settings can be used on Leopard (10.5) and Snow Leopard (10.6), as well as Lion and Mountain Lion. These include settings like enabling a 2D- dock, disabling local Time Machine backups, hiding Spotlight search, and more. The Lion tab shows items specific to the Lion system such as disabling Auto-Save, enabling Airdrop on old machines, changing the look of Address Book and iCal to aluminum, and more. The Mountain Lion tab similar changes you can make to Mountain Lion, such as disabling Gatekeeper. The Restore tab simply is a giant button that allows you to reset all the things you changed through Mountain Tweaks to their original states.

The app states that many of the tweaks available to Lion are also available to Mountain Lion, but only a few work the other way around. The app has a wide selection of tweaks for Lion and for Mac OS X in general, but there aren’t very many for Mountain Lion at all. However, Lion Tweaks didn’t have to many either but now has quite a few tricks up its sleeve. It’s safe to say we can expect the same to come from Mountain Tweaks in future updates.

Mountain Tweaks is available for OS 10.5 and later, though it is best run on OS 10.7 and OS 10.8 (Lion and Mountain Lion respectively). While it is a free app, the developer does ask for donations if you like the software, which I did. You can check it at http://tweaksapp.com/app/mountain-tweaks/.

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5 thoughts on “App of the Week: Mountain Tweaks”

Thank you for the information. I’m not really surprised by this, but the developer states in Mountain Tweaks that it should be possible to use the app in 10.5 and 10.6. You might try contacting the developer. So what is the app doing?

Thank you for your kind reply. When I’m trying to launch the app, it says “You cannot use this version of the application Lion Tweaks with this version of Mac OS X.” I tried the Mountain Tweaks too, but it’s doing the same.

That’s what I thought. Apparently the version numbers in the app don’t support 10.5, which is odd given the developer’s notes. I’m sorry to hear this. Again, you might go to the Mountain Tweaks website if you want to try to get this working on Leopard. In the meantime, I will update the article to reflect this new information. Thank you for the feedback and for visiting this website.